Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Algorithmic trading firms were put on notice last Monday when Commissioner Bart Chilton of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said that high frequency trading (HFT) and algorithmic trading firms should be made legally responsible for maintaining a minimum set of testing and monitoring standards to prevent future flash crashes.

The possibility that algorithmic trading firms may need to support new regulatory requirements highlights the rapidly growing importance of the market data cloud and new cloud services like NASDAQ Data-On-Demand for back testing purposes.

In a bid to resuscitate the heroes of 1980’s sitcoms, Mr. Chilton declared, “I want to be like MacGyver. Remember, he was always trying to prevent crime before it happened.” So if you’re a criminally culpable algorithmic trading firm, you’d best beware—especially if Mr. Chilton gets his hands on a paper clip and a stick of chewing gum. Household items aside, Mr. Chilton also plans to rely on tools such as a “kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” He’d like algorithmic trading systems to be tested by either exchanges or regulators before going live. And after going live, he’d like algorithmic trading systems to be monitored on an on-going basis.

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This week NASDAQ was the first major exchange to launch an on-demand service offering Level 1 historical stock tick data.  As the first truly on-demand service for historical stock tick data, NASDAQ Data-On-Demand is leading a revolution that’s democratizing access to market data and reducing costs by orders of magnitude.

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Now that the cat’s finally out of the bag on BGCantor’s new on-demand web services, I can finally take the readers of the Xignite blog back stage for a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the biggest initiative in the on-demand financial web services world since the start of Xignite.

BGCantor On-Demand offers fixed income and derivatives data via on-demand web services using Xignite’s core platform.

What happened behind the scenes?  How did this new on-demand business get launched?  And what did it take to launch it?  Well, first and foremost, it took a great team at BGCantor Market Data.  The BGCantor team was absolutely delightful to work with.  Everyone was highly knowledgeable, very responsive, dedicated to accomplishing the mission and very excited about the whole project.  We couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with.

Together, the BGCantor/Xignite team started by designing web services to be truly application-ready, combining Xignite’s web service experience with BGCantor’s in-depth market data knowledge.  Then we coded the web services on top of the XigniteOnDemand market data distribution platform for rapid development on a robust, high-performance, highly scalable architecture.  At the same time, we also built the BGCantor On-Demand website and tightly integrated it with the web services themselves.  To help manage the new on-demand business, we also deployed an administrative portal for on-going management of customer accounts.  At the same time, on the sales and marketing front, we worked together to find just the right usage-based pricing model to drive strong revenue growth for BGCantor while also delivering exceptional value for BGCantor’s customers.  Then we collaborated on developing marketing collateral and sales tools.

As for showing you blooper videos of our behind-the-scenes footage, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite convince Legal to sign off on that. Sorry. Maybe next time.

If you will be in NYC for the Cloud Computing Expo on March 30, then be sure to check out the Forbes.com – Xignite session.  While much of the program is how-to/technical in nature, this will be one of the few real world cloud computing case studies presented at the Expo.

Click the image for a full session description

We’ll be discussing how we brought BATS Exchange real-time quotes to Forbes.com using the Xignite financial Web services platform and Amazon Web Services EC2. Many thanks to Forbes.com for getting us up with the allstar list.  Great headshot Jeff!

As a cloud services provider, we often find ourselves bridging the gap between the well established financial services IT community the emerging SaaS / cloud computing technology communities and the wild and crazy world of Web 2.0.  We recently attended the Web 2.0 show in New York city where I spent some time spreading the word about cloud computing and financial web services in this short interview with Alana Taylor of Mashable.